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Mrs. Gentry, my high school English teacher, wore pleated denim skirts and black leather loafers that padded along with her about the classroom. She taught poetry to our 11th grade American Lit class as if it were truly a weighty matter. And even now I can hear the ringing of the gavel, a front-and-center witness to the Salem witch trials, as we listened to a dramatic audio of Arthur Miller's The Crucible.

I grieved with her when she missed more and more school days to care for her husband as he fought cancer. I didn't want to let her go when I moved across the hall to Mrs. Barnes' senior English Lit classroom. Before I graduated high school, Mrs. Gentry wrote my first-ever college recommendation letter, allowing me to see her glowing remarks before sealing the envelope that held my college applications, what felt like my future.

After my freshman year, I changed my major from psychology to English because I remembered how Mrs. Gentry encouraged my love of words and made a difference in who I was becoming.

She was a brilliant teacher, one of the finest I ever had.

But she would be a terrible editor.

I mean no offense to Mrs. Gentry and all beloved English teachers everywhere, but here's the thing:

High school English teachers are trained to educate their students in the study of literature and writing, namely the skills and know-how used for academic writing. This is the kind of writing students and professional scholars use in an academic setting—high school, college, and graduate school—or to seek publication in a scholarly journal.

I was an English teacher and taught academic writing for years. It is the foundation of all my early training and I credit it for a love of research and an ability to spot a faulty argument or a weak hook in a manuscript.

But when I set my sights on working in publishing, I knew my skill set was incomplete.

I needed to study the craft and the industry just like any other publishing professional or writer must do. I needed to understand what it takes to publish and write for the market and for a specific audience of readers who buy and enjoy books.

I needed to become a student once again. And so do you.

When you do your homework, you'll discover the important differences in academic writing and writing for the general market. You'll then realize that not just anyone with writing or teaching experience will do to edit your book.

If you have a fiction or non-fiction manuscript or book proposal ready for editing, resist the temptation to ask your beloved high school English teacher—or your high-school-English-teacher-neighbor, or that friend-of-a-friend-high-school-English-teacher—to be your editor.

Instead, continue to do your homework to find the right professional editor for you.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

Ask other writers and colleagues for referrals and recommendations.

Scan the acknowledgements for editors' names in books similar to your own.

Attend writers' conferences where you will have access to agents, editors, and writers who will be happy to give you recommendations.

Becoming a writer is so much more than actually writing the book. Editing is half the battle to publishing, so I’ve gathered some of my fellow writing friends’ best advice about tackling the dreaded editing task.

Editing Tips

Just as you “become” the characters in order to write about them and their reactions and motivations authentically, “become” an editor in editing stage. Approach your manuscript without your writer-heart emotional attachment to it. Read as if you were an editor…a ruthless one at that. Temporarily divorce yourself from being the one who wrote the piece and instead become the one bent on making it stronger, clearer, more lyrical, and crisper. Pretend you don’t know the characters and the story yet. Does it make sense? Pretend you don’t know what that sentence is supposed to say. Does it? If you can get into the mind of a 90-year-old marathon runner in order to write about her, you can get into the mind of an editor in order to edit. —Cynthia Ruchti

Read the story aloud, preferably to a listener or use a read-aloud program to read it to you. I use TextAloud (from NextUp.com). —Linda Ford

1. Incorporate body language and emotion into every aspect of your writing. By blending the two, the writer shows emotion instead of telling it. 2. Create an antagonistic setting. Consider setting as a character who is working against your protagonist achieving his/her goal. —DiAnn Mills

Read it back to yourself slowly and aloud to catch typos, and then read it on a recorder and listen to the flow of the words. There’s no better way to catch the glitches. —Hannah Alexander

My best editing tip is to read your document out loud or to run it through a program that reads it to you. You’ll hear mistakes like a repeat of two words like “the the” that your eyes will skim over and read as one “the.” —Vickie McDonough

I guess my best tip would also be my favorite writer’s quote: “In your writing, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.” That’s from NT Times bestselling author Elmore Leonard. To accomplish this, take a sharp scalpel to your work. And before you send it in, give your manuscript to several fiction-loving readers (don’t have to be writers themselves), begging them to highlight places that tempted them to skip, areas that bored them, confused them, or forced them to read more than once to understand. —Dan Walsh

In this busy world of hurry-up-and-publish, sometimes we don’t give a novel time and therefore the writer time to mull over the story to deepen and strengthen it. My piece of advice for editing is to give some time between writing the novel and editing it. That way, the writer can view the material more objectively. —Leanna Ellis

l. Leave some time between finishing and editing the mss, so that you come at it afresh. 2. Do you really need this scene/paragraph/word? If not, excise. 3. Delete all attributions. Substitute beats showing action. 4. Keep a calendar or diary of events to hand, to check back when she said or did whatever. 5. Praise the Lord for a good copy-editor, who is going to pick up all the errors you’ve made! —Veronica Heley

I get letters almost daily from people who want to write a novel. Most of them have started one, and some are close to the end of their book. But once the writing starts, the fears come quickly. We know what we want to say. We know what story we want to share . . . but the words on the page often don’t match. We look at our manuscript and see that it needs so much work! I remember that feeling. I still feel that way at times.

I’ve written more than 40 books, and all of them seem TOO BIG for me. I always look at the words and paragraphs and think, “Am I going to be able to pull this off?”

I love what Anne Lamott said: “Just look at the one-inch picture frame and do the next thing.”

No one writes a perfect novel the first time out of the chute.

If it takes a year to edit your book, let it take a year.

If you need to start over, once you’ve come to the end and know your characters and the situation better, then by golly start over.

My first novel took a couple of years to write. Some authors I know go through complete rewrites after the first draft. I’m friends with a NY Times best-selling author (you would know her name), and she was just told by her editor that she needs to rewrite a large portion her book completely . . . and she rolled up her sleeves and got started!

Rewriting is the real work of writing, and we shouldn’t be afraid of that.

Of course we need the right information to make sure we rewrite well. We also need the right support group. I highly recommend ACFW if you’re not a part. There is a loop where people ask questions and workshops. There are also writing contests for unpublished authors so you can “submit” before you “submit”—to get constructive feedback and to see how your manuscript stacks up.

Remember this whole process takes time.

I started writing in 1994, and my first book came out in 2003. That’s 8 years later. With ANY career, people expect time to grow and learn. Doctors go to school. Teachers go to school and then student-teach. Artists go to art school. Writers must write—lots.

No one in any other occupation feels they have to get it right the first time. Remember that!

So, maybe the words on the page aren’t what you hoped for. Keep the best ones, throw out the worst ones, and rewrite the rest. It’s great practice, and you’ll never know what you may end up with!